Pressing Concerns: Smug Brothers, Hill View #73, Saoirse Dream, Axis: Sova

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Welcome to the Monday Pressing Concerns! We have new albums from four artists who’ve shown up in these pages before: Smug Brothers, Hill View #73, Saoirse Dream, and Axis: Sova. I think you’ll enjoy these!

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Smug Brothers – Pinhole to Vortex

Release date: September 18th
Record label: Anyway
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, 90s indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Exit to Chagrin

A new Smug Brothers release is always a welcome occasion in the world of Rosy Overdrive, and we’ve had plenty of such occasions thanks to the nose-down persistence of the Columbus quartet when it comes to making southwestern-Ohio-style indie rock. Smug Bothers took a rare and well-earned victory lap earlier this year with the career-spanning compilation called Gravity Is Just a Way to Fall commemorating twenty years of bandleader Kyle Melton creating lo-fi Robert Pollardesque power pop nuggets under the name; they subsequently got right back to work, as the brand-new collection Pinhole to Vortex shows. Aided by the lineup of longtime drummer Don Thrasher, bassist Kyle Sowash, and guitarist Ryan Shaffer (which stabilized on last year’s Stuck on Beta), Melton leads Smug Brothers in fifteen somewhat dadaist, sometimes rocking, always catchy pop songs that ensure the “Smug Brothers legacy” remains an expansive work-in-progress.

Garage rock, psychedelic pop, 90s indie rock from Guided by Voices and others, and classic rock all go in a blender to create the likes of prog-pop mini-epics like “I’ve Seen Them Patch the Same Hole Trying to Get It Right”, effortless post-college rock anthems like “Blitz Meridian” and “Kind Enough to Share the Drop”, and underground flag-waving garage rockers like “Exit to Chagrin” and the particularly smoky “Bolt Through the Blackout” all in Pinhole to Vortex’s opening stretch. Dreamy psych-pop/chamber pop interludes “Speeding By the Way Things Used to Look” and “Wake Up (Be Your Own Planet)” are Smug Brothers’ version of breathers, key ingredients in tapestries that also serve to make stuff like the nostalgic thumper “Back at Earth”, the sixties-tinged garage rocker “Extra All the Time”, and the triumphant “Picasso Waltzes” hit harder. It’s impressive enough that Smug Brothers were able to release a two-decade “best of” compilation earlier this year, and it’s even more so that they’ve followed it up with an album that would rival any such retrospective from many of their peers. (Bandcamp link)

Hill View #73 – Flame Dreams

Release date: September 26th
Record label: Trash Tape
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz rock, noise pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: The Light

Hill View #73 is Awsaf Halim, an Atlanta-based musician who put out their debut album under the name, Night Time Is the Grace Period, back in 2024 on Trash Tape Records (Rain Recordings, Tombstone Poetry, Tanner York). Night Time Is the Grace Period is a beautiful indie rock record, spurring me to mention artists like Alex G, Jeff Mangum, and Dwaal Troupe (to whose Hallogallo scene in Chicago Hill View #73 have connections). Halim returned this year with the second Hill View #73 album, Flame Dreams, a nine-song, thirty-three-minute record that focuses and cleans up the sound of their previous LP without abandoning what made it work. Hill View #73 are less totally reliant on fuzz and distortion on Flame Dreams; they’re wielded judiciously in between moments of clarity much like one of Halim’s biggest influences, Phil Elverum (for example, the electric guitars come crashing in after a slower track to announce “Noise Song”, which is surprisingly the best pop song on the album).

Mix Elverum’s transcending of “lo-fi” with some Asheville “alt-country” (or, more accurately, general rootsiness) and just a bit of Elephant 6-ish indie pop from neighboring Athens, and you’re in the ballpark for Flame Dreams. Halim enlists a bunch of guest musicians (violinists Anna Zhai and Charlie Johnston, trumpeter Will Lovell, trombonist Paris Watel-Young, guitarist Nathan McMurray, cellist Ian McNinch, bassist Henry Tartt, pianist Woody Montilus, drummer Dante Andrade, and multi-instrumentalist Desiree Lily) to fully develop the sound of Flame Dreams, a crew that’s just as helpful on upbeat pop songs (like the particularly Elephant 6-sounding “The Light”) as on the quiet ones (penultimate track “Dragon” being one of the best examples of this side of Hill View #73). With Flame Dreams, Hill View #73 have matched their debut and pressed forward, cementing their status (to those in the know) as a remarkably talented and underappreciated indie rock artist. (Bandcamp link)

Saoirse Dream – Grimdark

Release date: October 9th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Chiptune pop, indie pop, pop punk, hyperpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dolled Up

The February 2025 self-titled debut album from Portland, Oregon’s Saoirse Dream was an unlikely favorite for me: the Catherine Egbert solo project’s first release for Lauren Records found the hyperpop-associated musician honing in on “a charged mix of chiptune pop blasts, pop punk guitars, emo angst, [and] lo-fi bedroom pop intimacy” (as I said at the time), leading to what was honestly one of my favorite pop albums of last year. A year and a half later, Saoirse Dream have already returned with their second album for Lauren, an eight-song, twenty-six minute collection called Grimdark. I suspect someone like Catherine Egbert will never make “casual” music, but this album does feel lower stakes than Saoirse Dream, somehow–that record was incredibly eager to prove itself with one massive pop song after another, but here, Egbert seems more content to try some odder things and see where they lead her. Maybe that means leaning fully into chiptune pop on opening track “Death vs Dying”, inviting collaborators Left at London, Estelle Allen, & Leastfavorite! into the fold for the transgender-experience-by-committee masterpiece “Dolled Up”, or getting surprisingly hushed with it on “Onlooker” and “Speechless”. I don’t love it as much as I loved Saoirse Dream, but that doesn’t matter: Grimdark is eight more songs from a very strong artist who is making very strong artistic decisions right now, and Egbert ought to be encouraged to keep creating Saoirse Dream records of all stripes at this time. (Bandcamp link)

Axis: Sova – Flowerage

Release date: October 23rd
Record label: Drag City
Genre: Garage rock, psychedelic rock, power pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Flowerage

Back in 2023 I wrote about Blinded by Oblivion, the fifth album (and first in a half-decade) from Chicago trio Axis: Sova. That Ty Segall-produced record fell in the realm of the garage rock, psych rock, and glam rock camps in which I’d expect a Segall-recorded, Drag City-released album to fall, and I complimented both the pop songwriting of frontperson/guitarist Brett Sova and the rhythm section of bassist Jeremy Freeze and drummer Josh Johannpeter. Three years later, Axis: Sova have returned with Flowerage, nine more songs and thirty-six more minutes of enthusiastic, electric, and pop-forward rock and roll music. Classic rock and classic “alternative” rock both loom large over Flowerage; the forward-charging post-punk of opening track “Blow Up” reminds me of the Dischord Records/Mission of Burma sensibilities I hear in SAVAK, while the sweeping grandiosity of “Fictional Autonomy” feels closer to the Hüsker Dü-informed space rock of Upper Wilds (which whom they’re currently touring). On the title track, Axis: Sova sound like a more hard rock-indebted The Cowboys, and their similarity to that power pop act underscores something I love about Flowerage: how consistently crisp and clear-sounding these recordings are. Made by post-punk/garage rock lifers or not, Flowerage is brilliant pop music, and Axis: Sova correctly treat it as such. (Bandcamp link)

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